A degree from St. Jerome’s University (SJU) has a lasting impact beyond our own community, as our alumni prove in their daily ventures and accomplishments. We want to share some of the invaluable stories and memories that our alumni have carried with them throughout their career beyond their graduation with our future and current SJU students. Many students ask about the possible career paths and opportunities that an SJU degree can lead to, and there is no standard answer, since the opportunities are endless! The SJU community provides many means to explore your interests and abilities that feed into your future career interests through student leadership positions, strong academic connections with your professors and classmates, and other ways to get involved with the daily activities around our campus. 

 

Not only do we want to build a strong connection with students before and during their time at university, we want to retain and continue to foster that connection years afterwards. Sue Brubacher, our Director of Enrolment and Upper-Year Transitions, shares how her role allows her to work with many members of our community, and how our alumni continue to influence our community years after their graduation. 

 

“Thank you Melissa, Ashley, Michelle, Ian, and Kyle for taking the time to contribute your stories for our Experience Blog. In my role as the Director of Enrolment and Upper-Year Transitions, I have the pleasure of focussing on and working with prospective students (students who are applying to SJU), to students in their upper- years and heading towards graduation, to when they become our alumni. Our students and alumni have accomplished so much and are passionate about being leaders in their many communities – school, career, where they live, and globally as well!  I hear stories nearly every day where our students and alum are making a difference.  Students and alum, we want to continue to celebrate all that you do!  So, please keep me posted about your current adventures or the next adventure!  You truly are the face SJU in the world!  Your success is our success!  We want to celebrate and cheer you on, now and into the future.” 

Melissa Hammell graduated from St. Jerome’s University with a degree in Honours Arts, Speech Communication. 

Melissa: Some of my best memories of St. Jerome’s are of time spent at part-time jobs on campus. From working at the St. Jerome’s library to becoming an SJU Liaison Officer, it was always fun to meet current and prospective students who also chose to be part of a tight knit community within the larger university campus. 

M: The smaller class sizes at St. Jerome’s allowed me to get to know classmates and professors, providing opportunities for making connections and having experiences that launched my career path. Twenty years later, I still keep in touch with the people that I studied with, worked with, and lived with at St. Jerome’s. Many of these connections have led to work, volunteer, and travel opportunities that I continue to cherish. 

M: After being a Liaison Officer for St. Jerome’s, I continued to work on the UW campus for an awesome high school enrichment program that grew into the Department of Knowledge Integration. I moved home to Ottawa in 2009 and worked for the next eight years at the Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health as a Camp Coordinator, Youth Team Lead, and eventually as the Director of Development, managing the centre’s fundraising and social enterprise portfolios. I now own my own consulting company called Pine Gum Studio and am the Vice President of First Peoples Group – a circle of Indigenous consultants and advisors who offer training and facilitation services to clients across the country. After years of growing my career, I have created a role for myself that uses all of the skills from my Speech Communication degree on a daily basis. 

M: Your university experience isn’t just about the degree, but the people you meet and the experiences you create along the way. You don’t need to fit in to the mould of someone else’s definition of a career path. There are so many amazing opportunities out there – most of which you aren’t even aware of in high school or university. This is the time of life to try out classes, clubs, and volunteer opportunities that are outside of your comfort zone… and then when 20 years pass and you look back, you will realize how these experiences created the foundation for who you have become. 

Ashley Dietrich graduated from St. Jerome’s University with an Honours Arts degree in Social Development Studies. She is currently a police officer. Looking back on her time at St. Jerome’s, she remembers the staff, students, memories, and friendships that were created. She feels that her St. Jerome’s degree opened many different career paths to her, due to the multi-disciplinary program that she studied. Her advice for future and current St. Jerome’s students is to study something you love, and to challenge the status quo. 

Michelle Green is a St. Jerome’s graduate with an Honours Arts degree in Religious Studies. She also completed two minors in both Psychology and Studies in Islam. 

What is one of your favourite St. Jerome’s memories? 
Michelle: One of my favourite SJU memories is the prank wars we started with my friends while in residence. Thursday night unofficially became prank night a few months into the school year and a few of the girls on my floor would sneak over the boy's building and pull of silly harmless pranks in our friend's rooms (stacking towers of water cups outside their door etc. the typical residence pranks). They would always retaliate in the most bizarre ways. My stuffed animal frog was kidnapped multiple times, they managed to steal and hide my friend's mattress (it ended up being in her own room in the closet), my room was entirely covered in newspaper one night when I got home from class, at one point I was left a "love note" with some muddy flowers my friends had found on campus in a garbage. My favourite memory would have to be the culmination of all of the prank nights which turned into what we still remember as "the great hot chocolate war of 2012." Without going into to too much detail, it involved a lot of hot chocolate powder, a stolen blanket, an adventurous chase around all of SJ and a lovely bystander who ended up filming it all and narrating with a Steve Irwin accent. It was awesome. My friends and I have stayed close throughout the past 6 years since living at SJ. The group of guys who pranked me all those years ago actually ended up attending my wedding just last month and wearing blue as my "something blue." It was my special way of having them involved because they are still so special to me. SJ is a special place where family is made, even if it is in bizarre ways like prank wars.

M: I completed a degree in Religious Studies (RS) through St. Jerome's. Going into school, I had no idea what kind of opportunities this degree would give me. In my understanding, there wasn't many things you could do with a Religious Studies Degree. Regardless, I loved every one of my RS classes, and I learned so much about how we make sense of the world and find meaning (a big part of what we try to do in therapy every day with our clients). SJU provided the opportunity for some incredibly small class sizes- in my fourth year my average class size was four. This provided an awesome space for us to really explore our course material in depth with our professors. My degree at SJU provided me with Masters level-like seminars with some brilliant classmates and professors. My professors went above and beyond in everything, even in assisting us in developing our writing skills and helping to review our graduate applications and requests for funding (as everyone in my capstone class went on to be accepted into graduate programs). My RS degree at SJU opened up an opportunity for me to feel like I had something important to say. I integrated the knowledge gained in RS into almost all of my classes on therapeutic relationship, meaning making, and spirituality. Going into my graduate studies, I felt empowered and entered my professional degree with a wealth of knowledge that still informs my therapeutic practice to this day.

 

M: After completing my degree at SJU I went on to complete my Masters of Arts Degree in Spiritual Care and Psychotherapy. I completed two separate clinical placements where I gained experience as a walk-in clinic therapist, a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist working in a Parkinson’s disease care study, a violence against women therapist, a child witness program therapist, a couples and family therapist, and an individual therapist. After completing my clinical placement and graduating in June 2017, I volunteered for a few months at the walk-in clinic and then was able to find full-time employment. I was first hired by a women's shelter as a sexual assault therapist on full-time contract. Unfortunately, shifts in government resulted in cuts to the funding for that program and the position was cut before I even started. About a week later, I received a call to interview for a child and youth mental health government funded agency, and I was hired and began to work there by August of 2017. I am now 25 years old and almost one a half years into my first full-time job as a Child and Family Clinician. I work four days a week with an incredible and supportive team of psychotherapists and social workers. I work primarily with children, teens, and their parents as a Psychotherapist. I am learning every day and continuing to grow in my clinical skills and in my creativity.

 

M: My advice would be for any future or current SJU student to take advantage of the millions of opportunities SJU provides for connection and relationship. As a therapist working with youth, I see a lot of teens struggling to figure out their identity and what their life is about. SJU was an amazing place for me to grow into a young adult and discover what things in life are truly important to me. Through SJU I was able to travel to Peru and learn more about the world, and I was able to find multiple part-time employment opportunities and student leadership roles that helped me develop job skills I still use today. I was able to have very small classes where my professors encouraged self-reflection and critical thinking about the world and about ourselves. Most importantly, I was able to create incredibly strong relationships with staff, faculty and students. The relationships and potential for connection and belonging at SJU allowed me to feel safe enough to be bold and reach beyond my academic goals, to grow into my own spirituality and faith as an adult, to feel in synch with my values and goals in life, and to feel connected to a whole community of people who supported me.

Ian Sherman graduated from St. Jerome’s University with an Arts degree in History and Political Science. 

What is one of your favourite St. Jerome’s memories? 
Ian: It is difficult to pin down just one, but I always think back to the House Dinners as a really special time. In particular, any final House Dinner of the term (Christmas or April). We had found our niche(s) as students and members of the community, and took time to reflect and celebrate the successes that year. It was the *pause* in the chaos of the term ending and exams beginning that reminded us what made SJU and each other great. 

What opportunities do you feel that your St. Jerome’s degree has opened to you? 
I: Too many to count. The challenger mentality that one develops in a Liberal Arts degree is the highest value and opportunity driver, in my opinion. Helping customers define and deliver new business directions requires a level of critical thinking that was refined at SJU and the University of Waterloo. Regardless of Majors and Minors, the opportunities driven from an informed and substantiated (by facts, data, and conviction) approach are second to none. 

What has your career path looked like to date? 
I: I attended Graduate School, then worked in Human Resources (recruiting), then moved on to enterprise software sales. Not exactly typical, but in retrospect it makes sense. Most recently, I spent five years at Salesforce, and am now with PagerDuty (IT incident response) in enterprise software.

What advice would you like to share with future and current St. Jerome’s students?
I: Be curious about the people around you and what drives them. Developing emotional intelligence (EQ) is a constant journey, and forming a muscle around being curious about people will be used every single day in your professional life. The diversity of the SJU community is an unrivalled environment to get started. 

Kyle Nash is a graduate from St. Jerome’s University with an Honours Arts degree in Psychology. 

What is one of your favourite St. Jerome’s memories? 
Kyle: It’s really hard to sum up three years of SJU memories. Meeting my wife (in the same SJU room that her parents met in) definitely tops the list! The strongest feeling I remember is the feeling of home- SJU became a home to me after moving away from my family, and being able to meet so many extraordinary people that I am lucky to still call my friends to this day. 

What opportunities do you feel that your St. Jerome’s degree has opened to you?
K: My degree not only opened opportunity within my career, but it came with a strong and diverse network of people. People that I have grown with in my career and personal life. Living in Waterloo region also has opened up so many opportunities because of its unique community and booming tech industry.

What has your career path looked like to date? 
K: My career path has been totally unexpected. I remember going to a talk from the Dean of Arts in my graduating year discussing how an Arts Degree allows for such a broad spectrum of opportunity. He was right. I have been fortunate enough to have gone from a failed Science degree in first year, to completing an Honours Psychology degree, all the while building websites on the side and turning that passion into a career in UX. Now I am fortunate enough to manage a team of designers for a Silicon Valley start-up. I would have never predicted any of this, and I owe a lot of it to the support of the community I became a part of while at SJU! 

What advice would you like to share with future and current St. Jerome’s students?
K: A quote from The Office sums it up pretty nicely: “I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.” Enjoy the time you have with the people you are surrounded with.

 

If you have any questions or inquiries about the content of this post or anything else related to alumni connections, please contact Sue Brubacher, our Director of Enrolment and Upper-Year Transitions. 

 

If you have any suggestions for content that you would love to read about on our blog, please send an email to outreach@sju.ca! We would love to know what our students are interested in reading and knowing more about. 

 

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